Saturday, March 26, 2016

Since I don't see the point of a GPS clock that does not show seconds, I had to figure out how to fit 6 digits on the 8x16 LED matrix. One way to do it is this:

as used by the "Matrix Clock V1.0". Kind of hard to distinguish between 0 and 8 though.

Another way is based on MixiClock, where 4 digits are crammed in a 8x8 (tri-color) matrix. (This was more than 4 years ago. Incredible how little progress I made since.)

As for the name, I settled for "Mondrian" because Kandinsky was already taken :)

The hours are shown in red, the minutes in green and the seconds in orange. After power up, the seconds blink until the GPS time is received (less than 5 minutes in my house, more than 3 meters away from the nearest window). Only the minutes and the seconds are synchronized (but not the hours).

The Mondrian clock is made of 2 boards: the wsduino with the GPS Bee plugged in (and the antenna affixed on the back with double sided tape, as shown in the next photo), and the LED-mini-display shield.

The GPS Bee module is connected on the hardware serial port (there are only a couple of pins left available, D2 and D17).
The clock has two buttons (on the LED matrix shield) used for incrementing the hours and the minutes respectively. The GPS synchronization occurs every 10 hours. That should be more than enough, considering that the highly accurate DS3231 on the wsduino board is responsible for timekeeping.
The clock, powered by 5V, consumes less than 200mA.
The sketch can be found here (compiles on Arduino IDE 1.0.6 and has dependencies on TinyGPS and DS1307 libraries).